"Tetris" turns 30 years old today. Thirty years! Where did the time go?

It seems like just yesterday I was playing on my Nintendo Game Boy in college, procrastinating before I got a D-minus on my Media Law test. And there was the time I played "Tetris" instead of watering my lawn, and it turned brown and died. Gather round, kids - have I told you about the time that I almost missed finding true love because I was busy playing "Tetris"? That's the problem with writing a tribute to "Tetris": There are no great moments associated with it. Which is pretty much the point of the game. It's about taking the player out of the moment, and into a sort of high-functioning intellectual limbo.

Is the groundbreaking video game a cultural necessity? No. But is it art? Definitely. It ushered in a new age of mobile gaming, and gave us an escape during an era of unusual pressures. "Tetris" was the greatest and most influential time suck of my generation.

The game was invented in 1984 by Soviet scientist Alexey Pajitnov. It was introduced on the IBM and Commodore 64 a year later, then ported to handheld devices in 1989, when it exploded in popularity.

Simplicity is its hallmark. Players stack one of seven differently shaped blocks, gaining points as the blocks blocks blocks blocks (Ed. note: The reporter just stopped writing midsentence here. We suspect he went to play "Tetris.")

"Tetris" was notorious for its capacity for work stoppage from the beginning. Days after Pajitnov invented it, his boss at the Soviet Academy of Science in Moscow outlawed the game at all computer workstations.

"All my colleagues saw the game, and when they started playing, they could not stop," the "Tetris" designer told The Chronicle in 1990. "This was a very serious place, with very serious work."

Going back to Atari's blocky first games, there was almost always an element of role playing. Pitfall Harry's life was on the line. You were helping Yar get his revenge. Even with "Pong," you could fantasize that you were Bjorn Borg diving down the baseline to make a save.

"Tetris" isn't about letting your mind wander to a different world: It's about shutting it down altogether. It creates almost a meditative state. The DNA of "Tetris," still popular in its own right, is evident in some of the most popular games in 2014, including the equally escapist "Bejeweled" and "Candy Crush Saga."

Has "Tetris" done good for the world? Not in many obvious ways. If the collective time and mental energy the world has spent on "Tetris" was instead used to cure disease, our life expectancy would have jumped to 126. But what were we going to do with those twilight years anyway? That's right, play "Tetris."

Digging deep, I can actually think of three concrete ways that "Tetris" has improved my life:

1. Packing for long car trips. Playing "Tetris" has left me in a much better position to cram large amounts of luggage in a small trunk. Especially when the luggage is L-shaped and it's a two-dimensional car.

2. Dealing with inevitable loss. I can't tell you how many times I built a perfectly formed cluster of bricks in the middle playing "Tetris," but lost the game waiting for a few of the 4-by-1 long, skinny rectangular bricks to show up. Metaphor for life right there. (Or at least a metaphor for Muni.)

3. Averting psychological meltdown. It's a stimulating world we live in, especially hard on those of us who grew up before the Internet and social media. My formative years prepared me for a life of smelling the roses, not crafting tweets. I need a way to check out once in a while, and wait for the endorphins to kick in.

That last one is important. "Tetris" perfected downtime, and this was no small thing. In defending my role as pop culture critic, I often try to explain that there's honor in making someone's BART commute seem to go by more quickly. Some of us create fine art, others craft a way to pass the time.

Has anyone done that better than the makers of "Tetris"?

So where did the time go anyway? I wouldn't know: I've been playing "Tetris."